G4C14: Dan Ariely / Who Put the Monkey In the Driver's Seat?

ladies and gentlemen please welcome the founder of the Centre for advanced hindsight at Duke University dan Ariely so hello hello good morning yeah so I want us to think a little bit today about the problem of self control and self control is a problem of now versus later and the reality is that we encounter a lot of those problems of self control and often when we encounter them we don't do so well so let's say for a second reflect on our own behavior so how many people in this room in the last month have eaten more than you think you should okay and how many people here in the last month have exercised less than you think you should okay how many people here have ever and please be honest on this texted while driving okay in last question how many people here have ever had unplanned unprotected sex some people are proud now if you think about all of those problems they all have a unique and similar characteristic which is that in principle we know what's the right behavior we just don't do it at the moment and here's a very general way to think about it imagine I had a box of the best chocolate in the world and I said what would you rather have a half a box of chocolate right now or a full box in a week half now or flowing that we can I pass the chocolate around so you can see it and you could smell it it was just here and if I posed this question to you how many of you would wait another week for another half a box of chocolate okay maybe 5% are saying they'll wait and probably if I actually pass the chocolate around there'll be fewer of you more of you would say I want it now but now let's imagine we push the choice of the future and we said what would you rather have a half a box of chocolate in a year or a full box of chocolate in a year in a week now how many people would wait everybody right in the future were wonderful people we will exercise we will die it we will not procrastinate everything will be fantastic in the future the problem of course is that we never get to live in that future we get to live in the present and in a present we do mistake after mistake after mistake I'll give you another one of those which is relevant for today so we have a project here it's called the truth box when we ask people to come and confess some interesting lies that they've told we're trying to make no time we're making a documentary movie on this honesty and we've interview all kinds of people who've transgressed in a big way and now we're asking people to share with us small lies or standard lies now if I ask you this question right now my guess and I'm not asking for hand but my guess is that many of you would say you know what we would go and participate in that but the question is would you really participate later on because between now and when we finish this session and you have a chance to go and check out our truth box lots of things would happen and those things will take your good intentions and basically eliminate them so we're trying to come up with all kinds of solutions for that so one solution by the way is to get people to pledge so everybody please raise your right hand everybody yeah cool you can put on your phone for a second it will be okay and then say I pledge to go and check the truth box today very good okay so now I'm not sure you'll all do it but I think we've increased the chances that you'll do it but let's talk more generally about solutions if we think about this problem of self-control on of now versus later there's a question of how do we get people to live in a way that is more consistent with our long term goals and not to be tempted so I want to present two solutions one is called reward substitution reward substitution and the other one is called Ulises contract so reward substitution I'll tell you a personal story about this when I was in hospital I got there a bad blood transfusion and I got the liver disease as a function of that and for a long time nobody knew what this disease was they just knew that I had all kinds of liver flare-ups from time to time and it kept on going for a long time we delayed with my recovery and after I left the hospital I was already in grad school I had another flare-up I checked myself into the hospital and they told me I had hepatitis C by that time they could identify the particular disease I had and they told me that there was an FDA test for a medication called interferon interferon was a medication it was originally approved for hairy cell leukemia and I wanted to see whether it would also work on hepatitis C and they gave me these injections and the problem was side-effects every time I gave myself on the injection I would get sick for the whole night vomiting headache shaking fever stuff like that not as bad as dying from liver cirrhosis but for sure and tonight so imagine you get home and you have a choice do you inject yourself and have a miserable night or do you skip the medication and if you inject yourself systemically three times a year for a year three times a week for a year and a half you might not have liver cirrhosis 30 years from now it's not for sure but you might but on the other hand if you inject yourself you'll certainly have a miserable night how do these calculations work and how what causes people to be better and worse than that anyway fast forward a year and a half I took the medication I had another liver biopsy and my physician dr. Killins Berg first of all told me I beat the disease which was good news later the FDA approved their medication and actually a few weeks ago they have a new version of it it seems to be much more promising but also he told me I was the only patient in the protocol that took their medication on time and the question is how come do I love my liver more than other people love dares do I care more about the future do I don't have problems with procrastination and delayed of gratification the answer is no to all of those the answer was that I reengineering I in a way that would give me an incentive to behave well and what I did was to use movies I love movies if I had time I would watch lots of them but I don't have much time so I don't watch many movies but on Monday Wednesday and Friday which were Injection days I had to deal with myself first thing in the morning I would go I would get a few videos in the video store these were in the days they were video stops I would keep the videos with me the whole day looking forward to watching them I would come home I would put the video in I would inject myself and I would press play I did not wait for the side-effects to start I basically connected something I did not want the injection with something I wanted the video I also was ready for the side effects I would take a blanket in a bucket for the anyway for the side effects but I was all ready for that evening by the way also when you're really sick memory doesn't work very well so I could watch the same movies over and over was very helpful now if you think about it this is a strange idea because the reality that if you rank the important things in life livers will be high up they're certainly important you should keep yours you should treat it nicely and movies and side effects are much less important and because livers are so important in side effects the movies are not everybody should have been motivated by me and all the other patients by wanting to keep their livers healthy but the fact is that the effect on the liver will be way delayed and because of that it's motivational force is very weak this is why we overeat and don't exercise and don't save because future goals think it would happen in a long time it's just not that motivating so what did I do I created something that was much less powerful but now the videos and because they were now they were actually more effective and I think this is one of the ways to think about gamification in general is to say there are all these things that would happen in a long term could people care and if the answer is no you say can you create a reward substitution can you create something immediate that people would act toward and through that behave as if they care about the long-term objective so think about something like global warming can people care the answer is basically no in fact if you took this the other way and you said let's scour the whole world for the one problem that would maximize human apathy you would come up with global warming think about all the things that make people our Pathak long in the future would happen to other people first we don't see it progressing there's no face to day suffering anything we were doing is is a drop in the bucket one of those calls apathy you know one person puts a small bomb in their shoe and goes on the plane and we all take off our shoes for years in Airport right hey global warming presumably a much larger risk people don't do anything even the good people who think they care don't do that much but can we create reward substitution you know one approach is to say let's just educate people let's just tell people about how important it is the reality is and it pains me to say this is an educator educating people about the long-term objectives is just not going to work well let me say differently we don't have a single piece of evidence that it has worked in the past so but using rewards substitution is very different it says let's bring the reward closer let's get people to act toward something and through that behave as if they care about our long-term objectives so that's the first mechanism reward substitution and actually I'll give you one more example for this imagine a medication called human in human is an anti stroke medication it's a relatively good anti stroke medication but compliance rate is not very high and you would think that people who haven't had a stroke would not want the second stroke so they would take the medication on time but they don't now imagine we have a technology called internet-enabled pillboxes these are pillbox and every time you take you your pill it registers online somewhere and now we can do all kinds of things because reward substitution needs two things the first thing you want is to measure and then you want to either give positive reward or some negative reward or punishment so we have these internet enabled pill boxes which mean we can measure and now we can think about how do we give people positive reward or negative so let me just ask you what would you try what kind of would you give people either as reward or punishment for not taking their pills on time money money is easy right you could say pay people coupons some discounts for something turn on the cable or you could say turn off the cable if you don't if you don't do it what else can the social recognition prize sex that will be a little hard but I like the direction we shouldn't stop with just technological solutions what what else sorry take away your phone right you can say people are incredibly addicted to these devices right can we basically slow down the internet eliminate texting shut down the phone what else affection some kind of caring from other people there's guilt I mean you can think about lots of things right we're basically saying people are not doing the right thing for the right reason maybe we can inject some other reasons into the equation and make the motivational force of this higher so here's an experiment the George Lowenstein and kevinville Wren and we ran a couple of things like that as well so imagine an experiment in which you pay people three dollars a day to take the medication on time we try that what do you think happens absolutely nothing now what do you think would happen if we pay people a thousand dollars a day to take the medication on time well we didn't try that and we need try it first of all we don't have the money but it's also irrelevant right of course with huge amounts of money you can buy people but you can never implement that so there's no reason to buy but what Kevin and George did was very clever and they tried two things the first thing they did was instead of giving people $3 a day they gave them a lottery imagine you had 10% chance of making $30 that's already better but they added something else to the lottery the other the end of the principle call regret what is regret regret is about the fact that our happiness is not driven by where we are it's driven by a contrast between where we are and where we think we could have been and if we think we could have been somewhere better we're miserable and if we think we could have been somewhere worse we're happy for example when would you be more miserable if you missed your flight by two minutes or by two hours why you stuck it to here for the same duration the same bad food why is the two minutes so much worse because you nearly made it and because you nearly made it you can imagine this other reality you say if the car in front of me just went through the life if the person in front of me in line understood what no liquids means if the TSA agent if the TSA agent had one more IQ point no you I guess I guess many of us traveled um here but but what happened is all of those give you many ways in which you could have laid it and this reality is not there but it's in your mind and you're comparing yourself to this reality and you feel terrible but if you missed your flight by two hours you can't imagine if only so that we are he doesn't exist it's not influencing your happiness a few years ago they took pictures of people who won medals in the Olympics and they measured how big was their smile and what would you expect gold silver bronze no gold bronze silver why the people with with silver the least happy because imagine that the a you woke up extra early every day for the last four years and you exercised every day and 90 seconds ago you got second place what what is your mind filled with what what you can't help with lots of if only if only and what about the bronze people at least I'm here look at the other people so if you think about this I think it actually has lots of implications for what happiness is all about and the idea that often happiness is not about where we are but where we where we could have been so how do you add this to the experiment imagine all of you on coumadin and the people my right are taking the medication people my left are not if we just did the lottery I would take the people who take the medication on time and I would give you your lottery tickets but if I try to add regret I take the people who take the medication and the people who don't and I give all of you a lottery ticket even the people who did not take the medication and I say Jessica congratulations it's your lucky day the stars are smiling on you you're the winner of the coveted lottery sadly you did not take your pill today so you're not getting the money and this is the essence of regret because Jessica can now think about a small step she could have taken earlier in the day that would put her on the other side of that fence and while compliance in general is around 60% if you add lotteries and add regret compliance goes up to about 98% so think about it we look at people's behavior and we see lots of cases in which people don't behave well people behave as if we don't care about the long-term consequences of our actions as if we don't really think we'll have a future and you can give up or you can say but we can do things we can change people's environments we can bring reward closer we can add to them things like guilt and closing your phone and money and penalties and regret and by doing so get people to behave in a way that is more consistent with your long-term goals so this was reward substitution the second mechanism I want to talk to you about is called malicious contracts and if you remember the story from the mythology Ulysses knew that if the sirens will come he will crash into the island and died himself and kill all the sailors with him so what did he decide to do he asked the sellers to tie him to the mast so this way he could hear that the call of the sirens but he couldn't act on it and yet he asked the sellers to put wax in their ears and this way the sellers were oblivious to the temptation in modern terms it's as if he loses himself put his cell phone in the trunk of the car so he could hear the call of the cellphone but he couldn't act on it and the sellers it's as if they turned the cellphone off so there was they were not aware that there was temptation this is a different mechanism this is a mechanism that says I know that my future self would misbehave so let me do something now that will prevent that future self from misbehaving by the way any examples that you want to share from your own personal life on something that you do to prevent your future self or misbehaving don't buy sweets right you could say let me buy chocolate cake and every other day I'll eat a really tiny amount right all you can say this is not going to work out let me not do that other things put the alarm clock far away actually when I was in the Media Lab that one of the students created a in a lunker called clock II and clock is a locked up with two big wheels now usually you go to sleep and you say to yourself I'm the kind of person who wakes up at six o'clock in the morning and go for a run but then 6 o'clock in the morning comes around and you are no longer that person you're a different person with different priorities now if you have a regular clock you you try to snooze it but if you have clock o'clock is now running around the room and you have to chase it and it has a random component so you have to get up and you have to go on the furniture and so on by the time you find clocking you're awake by the way the fatal design flaw of the first version of clock is that by the time you find it you also pissed off so if you'll do an image search you'll see lots of clock is with the wheels turned off so now she has a version that is an egg-like so there's no pieces to break but it's a little slow so you can catch it more easily so anyway work in progress working problems anybody here has ever hired a personal trainer I mean personal trainers how many of you if you had a session in three hours with a personal trainer and you could get your money back you would call and cancel the reality is the reason that we go is not because we care about our health is because we're stingy you say to yourself I will pay for this person in advance and my future self would wake up and my future self would not want to go to the gym but my future self would also not want to give up the money so aft of guilt they will they will go we try the more extreme version of that it turns out in the history of mankind nobody has ever woken up and said today I feel like colonoscopy so what happens what happens on the day when people have colonoscopy schedule they find other things to do I can't do it today I have other things work is busy and so on so so in some experiments we've often people a choice would you pay in advance some money that you will get back if you show up for Coronas could be but to lose it if you don't and about 50% of the people take that this means that these people basically know I know that my future self would misbehave and I'm willing to pay now money that I get back if I show up and I lose if I don't in order to force my future self I'll tell you one other experiment we've done on this the CEO of a company called Panda Express was in my class one day it came to introduce himself at the end of the class but the way anybody here has been to Panda Express what do they sell not exactly they sell orange chicken they have Chinese food but what they really sell is orange chicken and what Tom said he said what do I do with orange chicken orange chicken is probably one of the least healthy things you can get it's fried twice as salt and sugar I mean it really kind of shockingly unhealthy and Panda Express is not a health food store but they have lots of much better things or less worse anyway he said he said what do we do with orange chicken I said I don't know but give me a story let us play with it so the first thing we did was we posted calorie labeling on everything and what do you think happened absolutely nothing in fact New York City then decided to replicate our experiment they forced every fast-food place in the you in in New York to post calorie information as well and what happened in New York also nothing you know there's some papers show slight increased sham so slight decrease but in general nothing happened and for multiple reasons first of all this was not really surprised to anybody right nobody walked into McDonald's said I had no idea up to now I was sure this was the health store why didn't anybody what anybody company in general you know we know what's healthy not healthy there's one item by the way that I think people were confused about that's the muffin I think the muffin has been camouflaged as a breakfast food when in fact it's cake but generally we know what's healthy or not so that's the first reason there was no real surprise the second thing is what do you do with color information what is 900 what does it really mean how to how to grasp and the final thing is that on any particular day you can misbehave nothing bad will happen it's only if you do it day after day that the effect is cumulative and bad so color information does nothing so the next thing we did was to try Ulysses contracts people came in and we said hey today we're offering that if you're interested we'll give you half a portion of rice instead of the full portion at the same price and with that you would cut 250 calories from your diet are you interested a third of the people took us on this offer and those terms which people ate less and we measured how much they ate and how much they left people just eat whatever you give them the whole plate it doesn't matter how much you give them but you give them half a portion less of rice they each file 250 less calories but here's the thing sometime the same people came back and we did not say anything do you think anybody ever said you know what last time I was here somebody asked me for half a portion of rice can I do it again no nobody ever came with it by themselves but if we ask them again they said yes can we have that by the way the same thing probably applies to you how many of you think that when you go out they serve you too much food everybody and how many of you think it would be a good idea to say you know what today please give me 83% of the regular amount 92 so it would be a good idea but it's really not part of the of the restaurant ordering procedure and because of that we don't do it so your listener is extra smart because he created his own Ulysses contract I don't think we can count on people to come up with their own solutions but I think if we offer them solutions people would take it if we say hey would you like to get half a portion of rice or would you like to do something like this people would do it even when it's costly for them right because people could say why less rice give me give me the whole thing and I'll just do sometimes we realize that the future might tempt us and we will miss behave so that's the second con the construct Ulysses contracts how do we get people to realize that their future selves might might misbehave and they can do things now to prevent that from happening so so let me kind of summarize with the following if you think about self-control we don't have much of it and not only do we have not have much of it the world is becoming more and more tempting there was an analysis that asked the question of what is the percentage of human mortalities that are either caused by or aided by bad decisions and when they try to simulate this for about a hundred years ago they said was about 10% think about how 100 years ago you could misbehave in a way that would lead to an early death now it's about 44% how come what has changed well as we invent new technologies we also invent new ways to kill ourselves and there's one type of killing that we understand like texting and driving but there's another type like obesity diabetes smoking right and these are different cases it's not the case where you make one decision and it kills you it's a sequence of bad decision that is likely to lead to early mortality by the way at some point when the cigarette companies will think about how but not the companies we think about how to frame smoking you know one thing is to frame each cigarette is in your life by a little bit another one imagine what would happen if you planted in every million cigarette a little explosive device so it wouldn't be like a slow death like maybe this is the one you just find smoking may be very different mindsets so the problem is that life is tempting and if you think about it one of the principles from behavioral economics is that we are making decisions as an outcome of the environment that we're in and the environment that we're in is it interested in our long-term well-being or there on short-term well-being think about it who cares about your long-term well-being hopefully your significant other if we had preventive health care maybe that would have been the case but we don't maybe religion but really they're not part of our environment on the other hand everything that is available in your environment wants you to give them your time money and attention right now and they're everywhere they're in your phone they're in the environment and they're basically dictating our attention what is the goal of dunkin donuts for you to be healthy in thirty years from now or for you to buy another donor today today what is the goal of facebook's we used to be a productive citizen in ten year or to check facebook one more time today right all of those things are about tempting us and they're getting better it's better and tempting us and they are penetrating our life in important ways and because of that this ability to resist temptation and being able to figure out what are the mechanism that we could use to override those temptation is incredibly important and will only become more important over time thank you very much can I have my mic oh great so it turns out we have a few minutes until the next person comes so I thought I'll tell you something else in the meanwhile I know you have important things to check so so I thought I'll tell you a little bit about something very different which is this dishonesty project that were that we're working on and this has been really interesting because we've done lots of lab experiments on this honesty but all of a sudden we get to talk to people who've cheated in big ways and have done all kinds of interesting things in that in that domain so let me tell you one thing about a new experiment that we're doing and one thing about an interview until they kick me out so we have lots of ways to measure dishonesty but here's one of them we give people a sheet of paper with 20 questions and we say solve as many of those as you can in five minutes we'll pay you $1 per question people go ahead they solve as many as they can and then we give them an envelope and we say here is $20 count how many questions you got correctly mark it at the bottom of the page and then pay yourself the amount of money that you deserve and then leave the money and their thing here so there are two ways to cheat in this experiment you can solve four problems but write as if you solve six but then if you wrote six it is the number you can also take $20 so we call the first method cheating and the second one stealing you can exaggerate your performance and then you can also steal money in a more blunt way and what we find is that lots of people cheat but almost nobody steals so it's very common for people to solve problems reported they solve six or seven but it's not common to take more than seven dollars you wrote seven now let's be truthful now here here's an experiment we do people come to the lab and we said hey please flip a coin and we will tell you whether you get to participate in a task in which you can make four dollars or a task in which you can make for tutorials and people flip the coin and you say oh you got the four dollar task but then the researcher system looks around and he says look my boss is not here right now I'll tell you what if you give me the two dollar participation fee I'll pretend you came you've got the other coin flip so people actually by the way how many people do you think I pay almost everybody is paying paying the bribe I'm finished okay great so almost everybody pays the bribe but then what happens they both cheat much more and steal and I think this is what corruption is all about is the moment you come to an organization that you feel something is wrong with it all of a sudden your moral shackles go away we said this is a corrupt society corrupt organization I can do whatever I want and bad behavior follows okay thank you

Channel: Games for Change

Views: 10,998

Rating: 4.8471336 out of 5

Keywords: games for change, g4c, G4C14, Games for Change Festival, Games For Change (Nonprofit Organization), Video Game (Industry), video games, Dis(honesty), Irrationality (Literature Subject), Dan Ariely (Author)

Id: V1AsL8_cifk

Length: 33min 54sec (2034 seconds)

Published: Thu May 01 2014